Other Developing Countries' Climate Action Plan

Overview

Question:

What should be the Other Developing Countries’ plan to address climate change?
Submit proposals:https://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1302031
Rules: All entrants must agree to the 2015 Contest Rules. and Terms of Use.
Deadline: Monday, August 31 at 23:59:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Judging Criteria & Prizes: See below.

 

Background

This contest invites the global community to work together to develop coherent plans for how developing countries as a whole – their governments, businesses, other organizations, and citizens – can take effective action to address climate change.

Working as an individual or in a team, you can select plans for each of the five major sectors of the economy and propose them as an effective set of actions that developing countries can take to address climate change.  The five sectors are: energy supply, transportation, industry, buildings, and all others (which specifically includes agriculture, forestry, and other land use, as well as waste management). With help from the Impact Assessment Fellows, you will be able to see your plan’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenario from 2020 to 2050, and compare that with a business-as-usual emission scenario. You should also select a plan for one other “sector” (called “adaptation”) that includes actions to adapt to changes caused by global climate change such as changing temperatures and rising sea levels.

No single organization–including the developing countries' governments–could create and implement a complete climate action plan all by itself. Instead, successful action will require work by many different organizations and people.  

Articulating a vision for developing countries as a whole has great potential value, since it can demonstrate that there is a plausible path forward. And such a vision can serve as a roadmap for the many disparate organizations and people whose efforts must be enlisted.

This contest is part of a pilot test of a new initiative in the Climate CoLab to develop integrated proposals for addressing climate change at the regional and global levels. Learn more.  If you have feedback on the approach, please let us know by sending email to admin@climatecolab.org.

You are invited to discuss about strategies for creating regional and global climate action plans with the Climate CoLab community on the Forum:http://mitsha.re/1Lco4Wi

Key Issues

"Other Developing Countries" refers to countries not in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), not including China and India.  This includes the following countries, in alphabetical order: Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chinese Taipei, Colombia, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Islamic Republic of Iran, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, United Republic of Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Any comprehensive combination of actions to address climate change across a country or region must necessarily involve:

• multiple sectors of the economy;
• activity at multiple geographic levels (national, regional, and local),
• interventions in the technical, biological, and geological systems that directly affect the earth’s carbon cycle as well as interventions in the economic and political systems, and behavioral patterns, that shape the relevant physical systems.

Judging Criteria

Plans will be evaluated based on:

• How well you have selected a combination of individual proposals that are strong in the four judging criteria: feasibility, novelty, impact and presentation quality.
• How well you have  combined the different proposals to articulate a broad, coherent, and feasible vision for what the entire region can do about climate change.  

Note: You are welcome to select proposals that did not win prizes or even become semifinalists in other contests.  You may, for instance, find proposals that were overlooked in the original judging of those contests or that have some special relevance when combined with other proposals in your overall plan. 

Prizes

Judges' Choice and Popular Choice winners will receive a special invitation to attend selected sessions at MIT’s SOLVE conference and showcase their work before key constituents in a workshop the next day. A few select Climate CoLab winners will join distinguished SOLVE attendees in a highly collaborative problem-solving session.

In addition, if your developing countries' plan is included in one or more winning global plans, you will receive Climate CoLab Points, and the top point-getters will receive shares of a cash prize of $10,000.

An integrated proposal (such as a regional or global plan) includes ideas from all the people who contributed to the sub-proposals, not just those who created the integrated proposal itself.   To recognize all these contributions, a winning integrated proposal receives CoLab Points that are distributed among all these people.  The top point-getters will receive shares of a cash prize of $10,000.  Read more.

Submission Format

 

Building the plan. Your plan should consist of a collection of actions, which, when taken together, could effectively address climate change in this region.

You can select actions from:

• The Climate CoLab... You can include any proposal on the Climate CoLab platform, regardless of whether or not it won a contest, or was submitted in an active contest or a contest from a previous year.  You can also pick proposals from the Proposal Workspace.

 

• Off the Climate CoLab... You can also include proposals outside of the Climate CoLab – policies already enacted or currently under consideration; action plans proposed by cities and governments; strategies being advocated for by non-government organizations and think tanks; technologies employed or in development – by adding them as Climate CoLab proposals in a Workspace.

 

• Or create your own... If you don't see any proposals you would like to include in your plan, create your own in the Proposal Workspace, or work with a proposal author to add what you think is needed.

 

Your plan should include actions that will impact these six sectors: 

Energy Supply

Transportation

Industry 

Buildings (commercial and residential)

Other (including agriculture, forestry, other land use, and waste management)

Adaptation (preparing for the impacts of climate change)

 

You will also be asked to: 

justify how the actions you selected fit together;

describe the key benefits, costs, challenges and timeline of the plan;

and estimate (working the Impact Assessment Fellows) the emissions that would result from the actions proposed (see below).

 

Tip:  When editing your proposal, use the proposal icon at the upper right of the toolbar select proposals. You can also use the hyperlink button to link in ideas from websites outside of the Climate CoLab. 

 

Evaluating impact. A key part of a climate action plan is an overall estimate of the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the combination of all the actions you propose, decade by decade, from 2020 to 2050.

See your proposal’s impact tab for guidance on how to estimate these emissions.  You can also work with the Climate CoLab Impact Assessment Fellows, who can help you use the impact tools on the platform. 

Resources for Proposal Authors

Although, the impacts of climate change is global, countries differ both in their contributions to the challenge and in their vulnerability to its impacts. Ironically, developing countries produce minimal emissions relative to the global emissions, yet they are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their geographical features, such as the low-lying states, small island countries, and arid and semi-arid regions, make them susceptible to extreme climate related events including flooding, prolonged droughts, hurricanes, tropical diseases and more. More specifically, scholars have attributed the drivers of risk for small islands during the 21st century to include sea level rise (SLR), tropical and extra tropical cyclones, increasing air and sea surface temperatures, and changing rainfall patterns [1] while in Africa, evidence of warming over land regions, consistent with anthropogenic climate change has increased [2]. Events such as these pose heightened threats to their socio-economic development. In addition to this, high incidence of poverty, inadequate public infrastructure and weak institutions are other factors capable of amplifying the vulnerability of the economic, social and ecological systems to the impacts of climate change in these countries. Reliance on activities susceptible to impacts of climate change like rain-fed agriculture has also created a confluence of negative factors inhibiting true resiliency. Consequently, adaptation and mitigation measures for these countries are critically important. When put together, these challenges have serious implications for the attainment of sustainable development goals in the developing countries. 

Though developing countries need to prioritize adaptation measures, it should be noted that most of them are on the development path to attain high economic status. Some may be tempted to take the fastest route to develop economically, which may drastically increase their emissions. This is already being witnessed in some developing countries, which has led to an increase in global emissions. While taking into account their need for development, developing countries need to take a low carbon development pathway and avoid the high emissions pathway that developed countries have historically pursued to attain high economic status. Developing countries can implement both adaptation and mitigation strategies that not only reduce GHG emissions but also contribute to sustainable economic development. 

The information on this page is produced to highlight the concerns and needs of developing countries in adapting to the effects of climate change. The issues raised should guide the contestants when preparing the regional plan for developing countries. Contestants can also make use of data on emissions from each country per sector in their plans for the GHG emission scenario in any of the five sectors. This data can be accessed via http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-GHG-Emissions-by-Sector-and-Gas#tspQvChart More data can be obtained from the Global Carbon Atlas http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/?q=en/emissions.

Russia

For decades, two priorities have shaped Russia’s international and national climate change politics: export of oil and gas and focus on national security. On the one hand, Russia is a long-term important global producer and exporter of fossil fuels, and its economy is highly dependent on this source of revenue. On the other hand, climate change related discussions in Russia are inward looking: the problem is assessed from the perspective of possible threats that it could have within country’s borders [3]. Russia’s climate change plan reflects both of these priorities.

In 2009, Russia adopted an important document, Climate Doctrine (????????????? ????????), which aimed to create a strategic vision and policy priorities in addressing climate change. In 2011, a Comprehensive Plan of Implementation of the Climate Doctrine [4] came out, containing deadlines and measures until 2020. However, National level climate policies lack specifics regarding the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and do not adequately reflect the role of regions in these efforts [5].

Reference

[1] Nurse, L.A., R.F. McLean, J. Agard, L.P. Briguglio, V. Duvat-Magnan, N. Pelesikoti, E. Tompkins, and A.Webb, 2014: Small islands. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part B: Regional Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Barros, V.R., C.B. Field, D.J. Dokken, M.D. Mastrandrea, K.J. Mach, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L.White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1613-1654.

[2] Niang, I., O.C. Ruppel, M.A. Abdrabo, A. Essel, C. Lennard, J. Padgham, and P. Urquhart, 2014: Africa. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part B: Regional Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Barros, V.R., C.B. Field, D.J. Dokken, M.D. Mastrandrea, K.J. Mach, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L.White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1199-1265.